


Seeking Comprehension

by IamShadow21



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Book 3: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Canon Compliant, Community: weasley_fest, Disability, Disabled Character, Dyslexia, Dyslexic Oliver Wood, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Gift Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Learning Disabilities, M/M, Opposites Attract, POV First Person, POV Percy Weasley, Quidditch, Tutoring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-08-09
Updated: 2008-08-09
Packaged: 2018-01-03 08:27:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1068257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IamShadow21/pseuds/IamShadow21
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After six years of existing side by side as complete opposites, Percy and Oliver find some common ground. <i>Set in 1993.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Seeking Comprehension

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jadis31](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=jadis31).



> Written for jadis31 for weasley_fest '08.
> 
>   
>    
>  Art by thanfiction. Banner by jo_ron.   
> 
> 
> I know your biggest kink is Percy once he's left home, but this Seventh Year bunny just wanted to be written. I hope you like it. :) 

1.  
We didn’t have anything in common.

I was a middle pup from a litter of seven, in a family where things were used and handed down and mended until they wore out beyond repair, and it was a constant struggle to make ends meet.

He was an only child, born to parents who weren’t _wealthy_ , as such, but had a nice house and money enough to spoil him at birthdays and Christmases.

I liked strong, black coffee, puzzles in Ancient Runes, and a good game of chess.

He liked milky sweet tea, Charms practical work, and Quidditch.

Oh, yes, Quidditch. 

I had a five – no a _ten_ – year plan, with expenses factored in and strategies for available promotions all drawn out neatly, in a rainbow of ink colours, for easy reading.

He had some vague idea of playing professionally once his NEWTs were over.

“What if you don’t get picked up? Or if you get injured, and have to find another career?” I asked, one day.

“That won’t happen,” he said, though I thought I saw a hint of uncertainty in his expression. Quidditch was a rough game, after all. 

The next day, he approached me in the library, a loosely-wound piece of parchment in hand.

“I won’t do your homework for you,” I snapped. It hadn’t been a good day, and I couldn’t believe he’d have the _nerve_ to approach me like this.

“...tutor me,” he was saying.

“Pardon?” I asked.

He sat down opposite me, unasked, and bent his head close. His barrel chest was more suited to shouting orders at the rest of his team, and Madam Pince was already craning her neck in our direction.

“I know you’re busy, but I was wondering if you’d tutor me,” he repeated, in a careful whisper.

I grinned smugly. “Thinking about your future, now? Very sensible of you,” I said.

“My mum wants me to get good marks, that’s all,” he countered. “I’m still going to play when I leave here.”

I brushed that away, and quickly suggested a possible study schedule, which provoked an immediate, hushed argument.

“I plan strategy then, and then, for at least two hours!”

“Every week? Surely not. Just use half of that time for studying.”

He bristled, seeming to fill himself with air as if preparing for a shout that he couldn’t voice in this hallowed hall of books.

“That’s when I’m free,” I said, and pointedly bent my head back to my own work. “If you can’t be a little bit flexible to accommodate me, then I can’t help you.”

“Fine,” he said eventually, through gritted teeth. If he could have got away with stamping out of the library, I think he would have. He left the parchment he’d brought with him behind, and out of curiosity, I unrolled it.

At our first study session, I made sure to tell him exactly what I thought.

“This is _appalling_ ,” I said, dropping his half-written Charms essay onto the table between us. “How in the name of Merlin did you pass your OWLs?”

He flushed bright red, highly embarrassed. As he should have been.

“I’m good at the practical stuff,” he said. “I just can’t write essays.”

I sniffed, skimming the offending piece of parchment again. “Where are your notes?”

“What notes?” he asked, blinking.

“The notes you made in class. The preparation you did before you set quill to parchment. Your planning-out...”

He still looked blank. “I didn’t do any. I just thought we were supposed to write about the Disillusionment Charm.”

I took a deep breath, in and out. “Right then. First, we take notes. We’ll use mine, if you don’t have any. Then, preparation. Then, and only then, do we start on the essay.”

“All right,” he said.

 

2.  
He was right. He did have strong Charm work. I paid attention in class, after that first study session, and watched his technique. He was always one of the first to master a Charm, and produced strong, reliable, _consistent_ results once he did; something some of the others who were better at theory struggled with. When it came to the written work, though, he floundered, and despite the improvement in his preparation and general structure under my tutelage, his handwriting and spelling remained irredeemably poor. Fairly quickly, I realised that this wasn’t the result of laziness, or stupidity, but some genuine impediment that he struggled hard against, and I softened my approach as much as I could, out of sympathy.

“You wrote a ‘b’ there again, instead of a ‘d’,” I would have to tell him, and he’d sigh, erase it, and rewrite it twice, maybe three times, until he got it the right way around. Sometimes words would be mashed together, whole syllables missing, or words mangled to the extent that neither of us could decipher what they were meant to be.

It was no longer a mystery to me why he’d chosen subjects with a heavy practical component – Care of Magical Creatures, Herbology, Divination – rather than Ancient Runes, Arithmancy and Transfiguration. Charms, despite its fairly regular essays, was a subject he was genuinely gifted at, as was Defence Against the Dark Arts. He had been going to drop the latter at the beginning of the year, when he’d seen the Seventh Year course load for Charms, but when the new Defence teacher had found out, he had managed to talk him into keeping it. Professor Lupin had sat down with him and designed a modified program that would minimise the essays and maximise the practical component, to give him the best possible chance of getting his NEWT at the end of the school year, even if he performed poorly on the written exam.

When I found out that colour coding made it easier for him, I made full use of my store of different coloured inks, and when the Hogsmeade weekend came up, instead of staying back and enjoying the empty library, I went with him to Scrivenshaft’s and helped him buy his own set of half a dozen colours, from pedestrian blue and black and red, to the more outlandish purple, green and saffron. 

Discreetly, under the pretence of choosing one for myself, I surveyed their range of Charmed Quills, to see if they had anything that would help him, but besides the fully voice-activated Quick Quotes Quills (which only students who had visual or physical impairments were permitted to use), there was nothing I could see that would be of any use at all. I picked out a plain eagle-feather quill at random, and permitted him to drag me along to the Three Broomsticks for a hot drink to warm us up before the walk back to the castle.

That evening, I sat at one of the big tables in the Common Room to work on my Arithmancy homework, and he ended up beside me. I made an empty show of grumbling about the intrusion, but he settled down to quietly working on a big diagram. It was a flow chart of some description, with directional arrows and remarkably life-like little pictures. My algorithms lay neglected for some time as I watched him work. I wondered how he could draw Harry as Seeker, only two inches high, but instantly recognisable, and yet half the time invert the ‘e’ in his own first name.

At some point, he realised he had an audience, because he glanced at me sidelong now and then, and moved his left arm so that I could see better what he was doing.

“Denisov Ploy,” he said, then continued quietly talking about the strategy until the last player was sketched in; Angelina, her long, thin braids streaming behind her, the Quaffle in her hands. “Ready? Watch this,” he said, then tapped the paper lightly with his wand. The diagram sprang to life, and the Quaffle sped back and forth between the Chasers in a dizzying blur until it zipped past the Slytherin Keeper and neatly through the centre hoop. “The Keeper thinks the attack’s going to come from the left, because that’s where two out of the three of our Chasers are, and because the third Chaser is left more or less unprotected. Slytherin play with brute strength, so they won’t necessarily see the ‘weak’ Chaser as a threat. Depending on how inflexible their game plan is, we may be able to use variations on this at least half a dozen times in the coming match before they catch on and adapt for it, and once they do, we’ll just reverse it and start attacking with numbers instead.”

“It’s like chess,” I murmured. He looked at me oddly. “Well, not _that_ much like, but the strategies are very similar. Do you play?”

He shook his head. “Not clever enough,” he said.

“Of course you’re clever enough,” I argued. “You did all that, didn’t you?” 

I pointed at the parchment, with its assortment of tiny Players. The Slytherins looked annoyed and belligerent. Malfoy and Harry were glaring at each other in mutual loathing. Katie Bell was waving at me, and Alicia had flown up alongside Angelina. Their heads were bent together in what looked like a very intense gossip session. His drawing-self was gesticulating from his place in front of the hoops, trying to order them all back to their positions.

“Maybe after the game, you can teach me,” he conceded, looking down at the tiny figures speeding back to their places, then glancing sideways at me again.

The room felt too hot, all of a sudden, and there was an odd, fluttery feeling in my chest. “I’d like that,” I replied, through lips that felt a little thick.

He smiled at me, and I smiled back, and it felt like we’d shared a secret, even though all we’d talked of was Quidditch and chess. I went to bed feeling terribly confused, wondering why I was stunned that his eyes were so blue, and why my fingers were itching to touch that one large, loose, dark curl that always fell forward into his eyes.

 

3.  
The weather, the last minute change of opponent, the Dementors swarming the pitch, Harry’s fall from his broom – everything seemed to combine and compound the highly disappointing loss.

While the rest of the team had formed an impromptu kind of honour guard behind Harry’s stretcher on its way up to the castle, he hadn’t been with them. He’d spoken with Madam Hooch and Cedric Diggory, then slouched off to the Quidditch sheds. 

Sheltering from the worst of the rain on the doorstep, I stood outside and waited.

And waited.

And waited...

...until finally, I was seriously concerned that he’d done some kind of harm to himself. After all, I knew he took his role as team captain very seriously. Trusting that my status as Head Boy gave me the authority, I pushed open the door and stepped inside.

At first, all I could see was steam. My glasses instantly fogged up, so I took them off and stuffed them in my pocket for safekeeping. Blurry shapes loomed out of the mist; benches, lockers, cubicles...

...a dejected figure, head in his hands, down the far end of the room.

As I walked closer, the image sharpened. His fingers, wound tightly into his wet hair, the curls reduced to gentle waves. The smooth curves and sculpted planes of muscle in his arms, calves and torso; a far cry from my own, lanky frame. The thick, rough, white towel wrapped around his waist; the only thing preserving his modesty.

By the time I reached him, the platitudes ( _only a game, only one match after all_ ) and the stiff impersonal orders ( _should be back at the castle already, I could take points, you know_ ) had died on my lips, and I could only bring myself to say one word.

“Oliver,” I murmured.

He looked up sharply, as though he’d been unaware of my approach. Perhaps, in his despair he hadn’t heard me come in at all. His eyes were very blue, red-rimmed, and wet; too wet to be explained away as residual water from the shower.

More sharp, brisk words tried to force their way out ( _not worth crying over, pull yourself together_ ) but again, I couldn’t say them. Instead, I reached out and cupped his cheek with my hand, wondering at my own recklessness, bracing myself for rejection, possibly for a blow.

He didn’t hit me. His eyes fluttered closed and he sighed, rubbing his cheek against my hand. It was damp from the rain, the shower, and his tears, and fine stubble rasped against my skin. His hand came up to cover mine, and he turned his head just enough to press his lips lightly against my palm. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. My heart was pounding as loudly in my ears as the rain was pelting the roof above our heads. 

“Percy,” he whispered, looking up through his wet eyelashes at me, eyes burning with a gentle intensity. I shivered and bit my lip. Outside, another boom of thunder rolled through the valley.

His other hand slowly lifted from his knee and slipped through the slit at the front of my robes to rest on my hip. All the while his eyes were asking questions, and though my mind was screaming _no, no, no_ , obviously my eyes and other parts of me were shouting _yes, yes, yes_ , because I didn’t shove him away, I just shuffled a little closer and cupped the back of his neck with my other hand.

“What _is_ this?” I asked, my voice both fearful and awestruck.

“I thought you were the clever one,” he said, smiling crookedly up at me. His eyes were still mournful from the loss, but there was something deep within them that might have been hope. Both his hands were on my hips, now, and they stayed there when he stood up and brushed his lips gently against my own.

“We’ve got nothing in common,” I murmured in disbelief, my arms winding their way around his waist. Certain areas of my body were suddenly waking up to the fact that I had the very fit and very blue eyed and very handsome Quidditch Captain in my arms, in the Quidditch shed of all places, and he was dressed in nothing but a towel, slung low on his hips. It sounded like a scene out of the kind of tawdry Wireless play Mum listened to in the evenings while she was cooking.

“Of course we do,” Oliver said, moving a little closer. “We like studying together, and Quidditch, and you’re going to teach me chess.”

Before I could argue that that wasn’t enough to build a stable relationship on, he began kissing me insistently, and somehow, my robes and his towel wound up in a pile together on the floor. There didn’t seem to be much point arguing, after that.


End file.
